Thought-action fusion (TAF) is a tendency of individuals to establish causal relations between their own thoughts and external reality. TAF can lead to maladaptive behaviors typically observed in obsessional thoughts. However, neural mechanisms underlying TAF are still unknown. In this study, 38 healthy men were informed that MR signals were able to detect thoughts of the word 'apple' and that this recognition could result in the administration of electrical shocks to a person outside the scanner. During MR acquisition, they were asked to suppress or not suppress the thought of 'apple' while sham electrical shocks were or were not administered to the other person. The main effect of the sham administration of electrical shock to another person was shown in the bilateral lingual gyri, fusiform gyri, and middle occipital cortices (FDR corrected p? less then ?0.05). Also, fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, and middle occipital cortex activity correlated with scores of guilty feeling only when participants consciously tried to think of apple as less as possible. Our study demonstrates that visual association areas may play primary roles in TAF. The simple belief and visual imagery that one's thought may lead to someone's injury activated visual areas of the brain where, in turn, brain activity is associated with feelings of guilt.Visual presentation of appetitive and negative cues triggers fast responses in the human brain. Here we assessed functional MRI (fMRI) responses to food, cocaine, and neutral cues presented at a subliminal ("unconscious", 33&nbsp;ms) and supraliminal ("conscious", 750 and 3000&nbsp;ms) level in healthy, cocaine naïve volunteers. Because there is evidence of circadian variability in reward sensitivity, our second aim was to assess diurnal variability in the brain's reactivity to cues. Sixteen participants completed two randomly ordered fMRI sessions (once 9-11&nbsp;AM and another 5-7&nbsp;PM). in which food, cocaine, and neutral cues were presented for 33, 750 and 3000&nbsp;ms. Participants rated food cues as positive and "wanted" (more so in evenings than mornings), and cocaine cues as negative (no diurnal differences). fMRI showed occipital cortex activation for food&gt;neutral, cocaine&gt;neutral and cocaine&gt;food; dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for cocaine&gt;neutral and cocaine&gt;food, and midbrain for cocaine&gt;food (all pFWE?neutral in the middle temporal gyrus (pFWE? less then ?0.05). No diurnal differences for brain activations were observed. We interpret these findings to suggest that negative items (e.g., cocaine) might be perceived at a faster speed than positive ones (e.g., food), although we cannot rule out that the higher saliency of cocaine cues, which would be novel to non-drug using individuals, contributed to the faster speed of detection.The hippocampus is thought to play an important role in conveying contextual information to the amygdala as the neural basis of panic disorder (PD). Previous studies have revealed functional abnormalities in the hippocampus in patients with PD compared with healthy control subjects (HC), but no study has reported volume abnormalities in the hippocampus or evaluated minute structural changes in the hippocampus in such patients. We thus investigated volume abnormalities in the subfields of the hippocampus to better understand the neurobiological basis of PD. The hippocampus was extracted from structural brain magnetic resonance images obtained from 38 patients with PD and 38 HC and then segmented into six subfields. The relative volume of each subfield was compared between the two groups. The severity of symptoms was assessed using the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS) and social functioning was assessed using the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale. Our results revealed that patients with PD had a significantly smaller volume of the right cornu ammonis (CA) 2/3 hippocampal subfield compared with HC. No significant associations were found between the volumes of the right CA 2/3 and the PDSS or GAF scores in correlation analyses. In conclusion, CA2/3 is thought to be related to contextual memory function, and our results suggest that this particular hippocampal subfield plays a role in the development of PD symptoms.Vascular cognitive impairment, no dementia (VCIND) refers to cognitive deficits associated with underlying vascular causes that are insufficient to confirm a diagnosis of dementia. The default mode network (DMN) is a large-scale brain network of interacting brain regions involved in attention, working memory and executive function. The role of DMN white matter integrity in cognitive deficits of VCIND patients is unclear. Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), this study was carried out to investigate white matter microstructural changes in the DMN in VCIND patients and their contributions to cognitive deficits. Thirty-one patients with subcortical VCIND and twenty-two healthy elderly subjects were recruited. All patients underwent neuropsychological assessments and DTI examination. Voxel-based analyses were performed to extract fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) measures in the DMN. Compared with the healthy elderly subjects, patients diagnosed with subcortical VCIND presented with abnormal white matter integrity in several key hubs of the DMN. https://www.selleckchem.com/pharmacological_epigenetics.html The severity of damage in the white matter microstructure in the DMN significantly correlated with cognitive dysfunction. Mediation analyses demonstrated that DTI values could account for attention, executive and language impairments, and partly mediated global cognitive dysfunction in the subcortical VCIND patients. DMN integrity is significantly impaired in subcortical VCIND patients. The disrupted DMN connectivity could explain the attention, language and executive dysfunction, which indicates that the white matter integrity of the DMN may be a neuroimaging marker for VCIND.Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, considered a disconnection syndrome with regional molecular pattern abnormalities quantifiable by the aid of PET imaging. Solutions for accurate quantification of network dysfunction are scarce. We evaluate the extent to which PET molecular markers reflect quantifiable network metrics derived through the graph theory framework and how partial volume effects (PVE)-correction (PVEc) affects these PET-derived metrics 75&nbsp;AD patients and 126 cognitively normal older subjects (CN). Therefore our goal is twofold 1) to evaluate the differential patterns of [18F]FDG- and [18F]AV45-PET data to depict AD pathology; and ii) to analyse the effects of PVEc on global uptake measures of [18F]FDG- and [18F]AV45-PET data and their derived covariance network reconstructions for differentiating between patients and normal older subjects. Network organization patterns were assessed using graph theory in terms of "degree", "modularity", and "efficiency". PVEc evidenced effects on global uptake measures that are specific to either [18F]FDG- or [18F]AV45-PET, leading to increased statistical differences between the groups.